Under the credit where it is due category, President Biden has declared the Armenian genocide an actual genocide.
True, my sons point out that this has been a bone of contention in not a few of their public school and college classes. Most of their professors/teachers have long embraced the idea that America was one long, sad tale of genocide, slavery and racist evil. Tales of billions of happy indigenous peoples living in paradise being slaughtered in one genocidal massacre after another is the best way to sum up their history lessons. The flagship example of this always being the Trail of Tears.
Problem is, you can't call the the Trail of Tears, or other events in America's history of slaughter, a genocide and insist what happened to the Armenians wasn't. The Trail of Tears was a much smaller and more limited event compared to the Armenian slaughter. So continuing to quibble over whether that was really a genocide or not made it darn difficult to label the West's move into the New World as genocide.
So with this, expect the gloves to come off altogether. Or so my boys suppose. That doesn't mean it's wrong for Biden to call a spade a spade. Doing the right thing for the right reason is the only acceptable way to do things. But if the right thing is done, even for the wrong reason, at least that's something. And it honors the victims of one of the last century's first, and most brutal, mass killings.
BTW, here's a nice example of how people in the world approach topics like this. Notice the 'their hands weren't always clean, but certainly this was bad.' You would see nothing like that in a treatment of European or American driven anything, much less genocide.
Honestly, what even is Genocide at this point? The term has been used for everything from the Nazi Holocaust and Stalin's purges to Slavery and even something as comparatively small as Police Brutality against Black People. I always assumed genocide entailed the intent to exterminate an entire group of people but now supposedly just forcing people to give up their culture is "genocide." I know that the Actions of Leopold II, Planned Parenthood and the Chinese Communist Party have killed millions of innocent people, but are they technically genocide? Does the word even mean anything anymore?
ReplyDeleteThat's true. Almost everything means anything today, and anything can mean everything. Genocide happens all the time. Until last November, it was happening along the border. It's an American thing. But that's just one of many words now that basically mean 'anything I can apply to them whom I despise.' Or, anything I want it to mean, period.
Delete